When I got a copy of Mark Geragos and Pat Harris's Mistrial: An Inside Look at How the Criminal Justice System Works . . . and Sometimes Doesn't in the mail, I was primed to be either outraged or bored. I've expressed my view of L.A. legal culture and lawyers who rep celebrities qua celebrities before and clients who hire lawyers who rep celebrities, and I was prepared to

One of the few great virtues of American criminal justice is that it is committed in the light of day. Courts are open to the public, and generally—not always; anonymous juries are becoming more common, which ironically means that the terrorists have won—the accused gets to know who is judging him. In any case, he gets some say, through the process of jury selection, in who judges

Read Scott Greenfield's closing keynote address for Lawyernomics this week in Las Vegas. There's a race to the bottom in lawyer online marketing—"ultra-competitive business landscape,"* as Lawyernomics huckster Avvo would have it—Lawyernomics is there to psych lawyers up for that race—using Yelp! Twitter! Google! Virgin America!**—and Greenfield will*** exhort Lawyernomics attendees to go out there and win it: * * * * * Whatever sleazy thing the virtual

Former Williamson County prosecutor (and now Williamson County District Judge) Ken Anderson has been charged by a court of inquiry with 1) criminal contempt of court; 2) tampering with or fabricating physical evidence; and 3) tampering with governmental records for his prosecution of Michael Morton. (Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law, PDF, OCRed.) Which is nice—prosecutors who tamper with evidence and records to convict people of

Everyone knows the Miranda warnings. We have heard them ten thousand times on TV. Not everyone knows their significance—clients often ask me whether it's significant that they were not read their rights when they were arrested. It is not; the rule of Miranda is this: A statement made by a defendant as a result of custodial interrogation is not admissible against him unless, before making the statement, he was

This is from the arrest warrant affidavit in the case of Kim Williams, the wife of Eric Williams, the former justice of the peace who is suspected of murdering three people in Kaufman County, Texas: On April 16, 2013 an interview with defendant, Kim Lene Williams was conducted at the Kaufman County Law Enforcement Center. During the interview, Kim Williams confessed to her involvement to the scheme

I heard Thane Rosenbaum on NPR yesterday, and was instantly struck by how juvenile this law professor's understanding of justice and human nature is. (Greenfield wrote last week about Rosenbaum's Chronicle of Higher Education piece.) Rosenbaum's stated premise is that justice equals revenge: "A call for justice is always a cry for revenge." This is transparently false. There are many different notions of justice, and often when an

Quoth Papa Greenfield: Shortly after an instructor first arrives at Cardozo's Intensive Trial Advocacy Program, after settling in with a bagel and coffee, Ellen Yaroshefsky would give a speech about how to critique the students' performance. It's been the same speech for years: First, tell them something they did well. Give them praise. Then, when you tell them what they didn't do so well, be gentle and

Last week I was in trial (my first bench trial in federal court; we came in second). I was also excited to be scheduled to speak to Professor Ray Moses's "Opening and Closing" class at South Texas College of Law. I've spoken to the class the last couple of years, and it has always been stimulating and fun. I'd had it on my calendar for two months.

In a recent discussion amongst criminal-defense lawyers about the murder of the Kaufman County District Attorney, and whether we would represent the person charged with the murder (assuming that anyone ever is—my bet is that the murderers will never get caught, though a patsy may be), one of the brethren predicted that whoever took the case would have her phones tapped; her medical records searched; and whatever